The present disclosure relates to computer-implemented methods, computer-program products, and systems for migration of business object (BO) data. Upgrading an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to a new software release often requires migration of existing persistent BO data associated with a database on the ERP system. The need for migrating persistent BO data is common for new software releases often due to changes in a persistency model associated with a BO instance, for example, changed field value semantics requiring re-assignment of field values and/or new fields or values added to the BO persistency model that must be initialized according to application specific logic. Changes in the BO persistency model are often due to the need to fulfill new or changed customer requirements, system architectural changes, and/or to react to technology changes. Other reasons to migrate persistent BO data include refactoring of the BO persistency model and/or changes to a BO and/or business process model.
Migrations of BO data are typically performed during a software upgrade downtime period where the ERP system is taken offline while the migration of BO data is taking place. Depending on the amount of BO data to migrate, a migration of the BO data normally requires a considerable amount of time and results in excessive downtime for the ERP system. Excessive downtime impacts an organizations' ability to provide functional business applications and/or necessary data for use by customers. As a result, customers often forego ERP software upgrades and/or establish strict service level agreement (SLA) requirements between the organization and an operational information technology (IT) organization. The SLA normally mandates a maximum permitted downtime for the IT organization to perform BO data migrations in order to minimize the impact of BO data migrations on ERP systems' business application and/or data usage.
Performing migrations of BO data prior to or after the software upgrade downtime period also introduces technical challenges. Migrating the BO data after the software upgrade may restrict users to the use of up-to-date/migrated data that may be limited until the migration is complete. Migrating the BO data prior to the software upgrade may result in possible conflicts if users change BO data to be migrated and often necessitates data locking or multiple re-migrations of data.